http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27TwTHvlbYQ

Red tape

Chris Flynn



On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 4:54 AM, Ilona Koti <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Interesting question Glen.  You asked...
>
>
> "Lots of great responses on ancient Libraries, I was a bit surprised that
> Dan Saklad did not offer any opinion. Be that as it may I was now pondering
> where the term Red Ropes came from. I have heard that lawyers back in the
> day used to tie their papers with red ropes.  Have not been able to find
> anything to validate that.  But where did the term Red Ropes come from? And
> 50sogrey is not an answer.  I am slowing gathering data on some interesting
> RM topics so in a few months I can produce a timeline (more or less)."
>
>
>
> I have not heard the term Red Rope as much, but the term Red Tape seems to
> be more common.  I am listing the Wikipedia response below that gives an
> interesting history.
>
> On another note, I did find a related search which mentioned that the
> string used to bind some of the expandable file folders is red, which is
> true in some modles, I wonder if this is a latent reference to the original
> Vatican/Spanish use.
>
> All the best -ink
>
> [log in to unmask]
>
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_tape
>
> Origins
>
> "The origin of the term is somewhat obscure, but it is first noted in
> historical records in the 16th century, when Henry VIII besieged Pope
> Clement VII with around eighty or so petitions for the annulment of his
> marriage to Catherine of Aragon. A photo of the petitions from Cardinal
> Wolsey and others, now stored in the Vatican archives, can be seen on page
> 160 of "Saints and Sinners, a history of The Popes", by Eamon Duffy
> (published by Yale University Press in 1997). The documents can be viewed
> rolled and stacked in their original condition, each one sealed and bound
> with the obligatory red tape, as was the custom.
>
> It appears likely that it was the Spanish administration of Charles V in
> the early 16th century, who started to use the red tape in an effort to
> modernise the administration that was running his vast empire. The red tape
> was used to bind the important administrative dossiers that had to be
> discussed by the Council of State, and separate them from the issues that
> were treated in an ordinary administrative way, which were bound by an
> ordinary rope. Most of the red tapes arriving to the Council of State were
> manufactured in the city of 's-Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands, because
> most of the important dossiers came from the Low Countries and Germany. The
> Spanish name for red tape "balduque" took the name from the Spanish
> translation of the city of 's-Hertogenbosch which is "Bolduque".
>
> Although they were not governing such a vast territory as Charles V, this
> practice of using red tape to separate the important dossiers that had to
> be discussed, was quickly copied by the other modern European monarchs to
> speed up their administrative machines.
>
> In this age of civil servants using computers and information technology,
> a legacy from the administration of the Spanish Empire can still be
> observed where some parts of the higher levels of the Spanish
> administration continue the tradition of using red tape to bind important
> dossiers that need to be discussed and to keep them bound in red tape when
> the dossier is closed. This is, for example, the case for the Spanish
> Council of State, the supreme consultative council of the Spanish
> Government. In contrast, the lower Spanish courts use ordinary ropes to
> bundle documents as their cases are not supposed to be heard at higher
> levels. The Spanish Government plans to phase out the use of paper and
> abandon the practice of using ordinary ropes.
>
> The tradition continued through to the 17th and 18th century. Although
> Charles Dickens is believed to have used the phrase before Thomas
> Carlyle,[4] the English practice of binding documents and official papers
> with red tape was popularized in Carlyle's writings, protesting against
> official inertia with expressions like "Little other than a red tape
> Talking-machine, and unhappy Bag of Parliamentary Eloquence". To this day,
> most defence barristers' briefs, and those from private clients, are tied
> in a pink-coloured ribbon known as "pink tape" or "legal tape". Government
> briefs, including those of the prosecution counsel, are usually bound with
> white tape, introduced as an economy measure[citation needed] to save the
> expense of dyeing the tape red. Traditionally, official Vatican documents
> were also bound in red cloth tape.
>
> All American Civil War veterans' records were bound in red tape, and the
> difficulty in accessing them led to the modern American use of the term,[5]
> but there is evidence (as detailed above) that the term was in use in its
> modern sense sometime before this."
>
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